Do cultures, genders, education, working experience or financial status influence the effectiveness of transformational leaders?

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe main purpose of this study is to investigate how factors such as cultures, genders, education, working experience or financial situation of the company influence the effectiveness of transformational leaders. By using transformational leadership (TL) sand cone model, together with an analytic hierarchy process-based questionnaire and TL indexes as well as a descriptive research approach, we measure the TL effectiveness for 86 middle managers located in 21 countries at the same company. We find that highly educated leaders, female leaders or leaders in a business unit with stable financial status were more effective (higher TL index) than the leaders in the opposite counterparts. Surprisingly, senior leaders and leaders of multicultural teams seem to be less effective (lower TL index) than fresh leaders who recently (within 1–5 years) joined the company. The implications of the findings for both theory and practice as well as directions for further studies are also discussed.